Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Palmer of Childs Hill and Lord Stirrup

Monday 16th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 1 makes a very significant change to this Bill. In essence, it provides for a complainant who at the end of the full military process of investigation and hearing is dissatisfied with the judgment that has been reached to apply to the ombudsman for, essentially, a totally new hearing, not a review of whether the complaint was handled properly and appropriately, and not of whether the judgment reached was reasonable within the range of reasonable decisions that could have been reached, but an entirely new judgment on the merits of the case.

It is, of course, perfectly possible for two or more people to reach, in varying degrees, different views on the merits of a case on the same set of facts as presented. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is a dissenting judgment in the Supreme Court. This Bill, as amended, is now essentially saying that the judgment and view of the ombudsman is of more value and is more reliable than those of anyone in the military chain of command or of the Defence Council. Noble Lords will be able to judge for themselves whether they think that is a sensible thing to do. All I will say is that having been in the position of having to review many such hearings and judgments at Air Force Board level, I certainly, to some extent or other, found in favour of the complainant on quite a number of occasions. I could not give your Lordships an exact percentage at this remove, but my sense is that it was quite a significant percentage. The sense that someone in the chain of command is automatically going to be prejudiced and unable to give the complainant a fair hearing is entirely unfounded.

Nevertheless, this Bill provides for a process that is not simply judicial review but is essentially a rehearing on the facts. Given the number of complaints that go through in any given year, and that one of the defects that this Bill was intended to address was the delay in the hearing of such complaints because of their volume, it seems inevitable that the number of complaints on merit that are to be made in future to the ombudsman following the service process will be fairly large. This means that the ombudsman will not in every instance be able to hear that case personally. Some of her deputies, some of the people in her new office, will have to do that on her behalf. Although she will, of course, be called upon to sign off the outcome in every case, it will be people from the ombudsman’s office rather than the ombudsman herself who will hear some of these retrials, if I can put it that way. Therefore, it seems to me that if we are to agree to such an amendment, the very least we must insist on is that within the regulations that will give effect to this Bill in due course, the qualifications and training that will be necessary for anybody from the ombudsman’s office to sit in judgment on such de novo hearings are set out in no uncertain terms. The Minister alluded to this in his speech, and I welcome his words, but when he sums up I ask him to reassure your Lordships that he will come back to us with a form of words which, at the very least, will satisfy us that this unfortunate amendment will do as little harm as possible.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, first, I take the opportunity to thank the Minister, my noble friend Lady Jolly and other noble Lords for their input into this Bill. I think it is very important. I take issue with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, because, when my colleagues in the other place asked me if I had any problems during earlier stages of the passage of this Bill in this House, with the Bill having started in your Lordships’ House before moving to the other place, I said that one thing that I spoke about, on which they spoke in the other place, was that the ombudsman would be able to look only at the process rather than the detail. I believed at that time, during the earlier stages of the Bill in this House, that the ombudsman should, in certain circumstances, have the ability to do so—but, as my noble friend said, this is after it has been through all the chains of command, and it is not meant to usurp any of those points.